The odd-numbered one (Good Irina) makes her excuses and trundles home, smug in the awareness that temptation has been conquered and her moral probity will be rewarded with a long, rich, secure emotional life. Does she advance and kiss him, or does she retreat to the bathroom and the safety of her relationship with Lawrence, her acerbic, committed, un-fun partner?Īs it turns out, life really does turn on a throw of the dice: the Irina who inhabits the book's even-numbered chapters (call her Bad Irina for short) puckers up, and subsequently struggles at home to keep up the fiction that all is well with Lawrence. The point at which Irina's lives diverge comes at a charged moment late at night over the green baize, when the snooker player, Ramsey, leans in behind her to adjust the angle of her cue. Irina gets two, which run alongside each other in parallel chapters. But there's one big difference: Shriver only got one life, the one she chose when she left her partner. More tellingly, they are both Americans in London who ended secure, long-term relationships with fellow intellectuals because they fell for more creative types - in Shriver's case a jazz drummer, in Irina's a world-class snooker player. Its heroine, Irina, is of Russian descent, so she speaks the language Shriver studied at university she likes to cook with lots of chillies, as does Shriver they both shop at Oxfam and find the tips of their fingers get chilly because of Reynaud's disease.
The Post-Birthday World is the author's eighth novel and, I suspect, her most autobiographical. We've talked about Kevin now we need to talk about Lionel.
0 kommentar(er)
